Blacker Than a Thousand Midnights - Softcover

Susan Straight has published eight novels. Her most recent, Between Heaven and Here, is the final book in the Rio Seco trilogy. Take One Candle Light a Room was named one of the best books of 2010 by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Kirkus Reviews, and A Million Nightingales was a finalist for the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her novel Highwire Moon was a finalist for the 2001 National Book Award. “The Golden Gopher” won the 2008 Edgar Award for Best Mystery Story. Her stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Salon, Harper’s, McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the Believer, Zoetrope: All-Story, Black Clock, and elsewhere. Straight has been awarded the Lannan Prize for Fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Gold Medal for Fiction from the Commonwealth Club of California. She is distinguished professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside. She was born in Riverside, California, where she lives with her family, whose history is featured on susanstraight.com. 

Straight's splendid first novel, I Been in Sorrow's Kitchen and Licked Out All the Pots , portrayed a strong and courageous black woman coming of age during the 1950s. In her second book, Straight moves into the present and tells the story of a strong and courageous young black man. Once again, she charts the currents of fear, love, and determination that shape a life lived in the face of great adversity. Darnell, called Nature Boy by his baffled city friends, is a firefighter, trained to battle the great wildfires that ravage California's kindling-dry hill country. But he's only a seasonal firefighter, and when his girlfriend Brenda gets pregnant, he knows he has to secure steady work to help support her and their child. The quest for a decent job, however, is damn near quixotic. A gig as a parking lot security guard ends in violence, and an interlude running drugs snaps Darnell out of his deep depression: You have got to stay alive and out of jail to support a family. Ultimately, Darnell realizes that he has to be as skillful and decisive in all aspects of life as he is when he battles forest fires. Straight has a great ear for the music of conversation, and her prose is potent, dignified, and lyrical, elevating the challenges of existence to a level of universal significance. And she writes under the banner of hope. Donna Seaman